The best pizza restaurants in Sydney right now

Newtown loves a specialist, be it a vegan ramen joint or a café selling six kinds of lamingtons and not much else. So a skinny slip of a pizza parlour selling seven wood-fired pies, two sides and some chilli XO to dip your crusts in fits right in. Getting your hands on a Westwood pizza might require more forethought and planning than your average takeaway dinner, but the rewards more than outweighs the costs, so set your alarm for 4.30pm, because you’ve got to be in it to win it – and there are only prizes for the first 174 to make it over the line. If it's your first time here, the fermented garlic and honey pizza is legendary for a reason.

While some Sydney restaurants get flustered over fusion and newfangled cooking techniques, venues like Queen Margherita of Savoy stay steady with the classics. Home of traditional Neapolitan-style pizza, this small Italian joint slings their woodfired pizzas, simple pastas and select antipasto items every night of the week to an adoring crowd of Cronulla locals and wise visitors from the north and west.

Clams. On a pizza. It’s sounds too crazy to work. Here at this Newtown joint, little tender clams are steamed and pried from their shells, while the broth is cooked down with white wine and cream until it achieves an intense concentrated chowder flavour. They spread it over the top and then apply a liberal sprinkling of parsley and a squeeze of lemon juice before it slides into the shiny red wood-fired oven that is radiating heat out from the centre of the restaurant. The resulting wafer thin, charred, bubbling, disc gives spaghetti vongole a run for its money as the standard bearer for carbs and shellfish. Go for that.

This breezy trattoria continues to bring good times and a taste of Italy to the eastern suburbs in style. And while the antipasto and pasta are great at Matteo, we reckon the woodfired pizza is where it’s at. The dough is rolled and hand-stretched by the chefs, toppings are added, and then it’s fired in the oven. The crust comes out charred and blistered by the flames, with a perfect pillowy bite. There are 12 options to choose from, but our favourite is the Siciliana with creamy ricotta, smoked mozzarella, tomato, eggplant, parmigiano and basil.

This little corner shopfront on Pittwater Road in Manly gets top marks all round for the kitschy vintage styling – from the red-and-white check tablecloths and sheer, lacy curtains, to a solid wall of framed black-and-white photos. Wines by the glass are kept at budget-friendly prices; and there’s a self-service fridge for crafty brews. Our pick? The funghitown. It starts with a tomato and mushroom base, is topped with generous proportions of field mushrooms and fried kale, and the dried ricotta and fior di latte balance it out.

There’s a comforting effect that takes hold right away as you enter Dimitri’s, most likely brought on by a tidal wave of sensory warmth: caramelised aromas, a dark room alive with activity, red neon splashed across the entrance like opening credits by Ridley Scott. The pies themselves are a relaxed riff on the Neapolitan style. The gooey, rich and intensely-flavoured mouthfuls are best handled by pinching and folding slices over themselves, using the wide perimeter of bubbly, charred outer crust as an anchor point to allow safe passage away from your plate. If the toppings slide off, you have failed. Pinch harder. Hot tip: Dimitri's offers one of the most affordable set menus in town at just $50 per person, and it includes bread, antipasto, pizza, and salad.

Anyone who loved Da Orazio the first time around, when it opened at the same address in 2013, can expect some deja vu – of the most delicious kind. There is still the comprehensive Neapolitan pizza offering, each hand-thrown and charred to perfection in the wood-fired oven by dedicated paddle-wielding pizzaiolos who rule over their very own quadrant of the kitchen. The sweet, sunkissed acidity of the house-made passata sparring with the smoky, blistered earthiness of the perfectly proofed crust is what pizza dreams are made of. Our pick is the capricciosa with San Marzano tomatos, fior di latte, mushrooms, artichokes, ham, black olives and basil.

Found on Redfern’s main drag, La Coppola is a hole-in-the-wall joint that serves delicious Sicilian-style pizzas. The father-daughter duo Stefano and Cassie have perfected their pizza, which features a crisp base with a with light a fluffy crust. We’re big fans of the Scopello with burrata, salami, spicy pancetta, garlic, parsley, and chilli. There are a handful of tables outside and one large communal table inside where you can BYO wine and make friends with your neighbour. No seats? Order a pizza to go and take it across the road to Noble Hops and enjoy it with a beer. 

The lights are low, the chatter is jovial and the pizza is excellent at the Surry Hills arm of Bronte’s favourite pizza parlour. The pizza can be ordered with a bianchi (white) or rosso (red) base. The Brandi is as rigid as a military guard when it comes to following the rules for an AVPN-approved Margherita: six orbs of DOP cheese, a vermillion tomato base and four fresh basil leaves on top. The careful layout looks like an edible quilt piece, and straight out of the oven the bases here have just enough structural integrity to get the food to your mouth without it dropping in your lap.

Here’s a fun fact: the shape you make when you fold a piece of pizza in half to eat it is called a libretto. Yup, just like in the opera. And you know you’re eating a good pizza when you can fold with ease. The list here is strictly classical (your Margheritas, your marinaras, your diavolas), though there are a couple of house specialties, such as the Lucio. Named for chef and owner Lucio de Falco, the Lucio is about the only acceptable half-and-half in town. It’s half a regular margherita – thin-based yet puffy and charred on the sides – and half a ham-and-ricotta calzone. Can we get a mamma mia?

Pizza Mario fans, breathe a sigh of relief: David Cowdrill’s spinoff restaurant, Da Mario, is serving the salamino. If you’ve had the cheese-and-sausage pizza before, you know why this is the best news you've heard this month; if you haven’t, allow us to explain. The salamino is your mouth’s new best friend: a thin, charred base all covered in melted mozzarella and big puddles of ricotta and spiced up with crisp curls of salami. It's soft and rich and runny and crunchy and salty and sweet and if you're anything like us, you'll fight like a fiend over the last piece – and then you'll order a second serve.

Turns out pizza without cheese is still bloody excellent. Sure, there were a lot of naysayers on the internet when Gigi on South King Street changed to a plant-based menu, but they were wrong, because a chewy, wood-fired pizza base covered in Swiss brown mushrooms, garlic, dairy-free blue cheese, radicchio and roasted walnuts is delicious. We swear you won’t even miss the mozzarella. Don’t believe us? Just try getting a table – it’s a packed house every night.

Neapolitan-style pizza with a ‘rebellious’ twist is what you can expect from Freshwater’s pizza shop by Bella Brutta’s former head chef. Meaning ‘rebellious’ in Italian, Ribelle is located in Freshwater village – a thong’s throw from the beach – making it a cracking option for a post-surf or swim feed. And it’s BYO (there’s a booze shop up the road), so you can settle in for an affordable dinner, too. Our pick? The cheese and hot garlic honey pizza with fior di latte, parmesan, pecorino, fermented honey, garlic and chilli, which pedals salty, sweet and spicy flavours.

Not quite chewy, not quite crispy – the pizza at Braci stands in a league of its own. Head pizzaiolo, Carlei, hand-stretches the dough to order using a family recipe that he’s fine-tuned more than 60 times since Braci opened. At any given time, there are eight tempting toppings to share including a mix of fresh creations and old favourites. Take Braci’s killa beez, for example, which has created quite the buzz with tomato, fior di latte, hot sopressa, pecorino and honey, as has the veg-friendly queen envy with fior di latte, pea puree, zucchini, feta, mint and pine nuts. You can’t go wrong with a classic Margherita too, or the long-standing boscaiola with wild mushrooms (and added prosciutto).

The first Sydney wing of this long-standing Melbourne spot has lost none of its Latin luxe in heading north of the border. The salumi boards are laden with a Pantone palette of pinks – mortadella, prosciutto, Wagyu bresaola and salami – and the pizzas come out of the ovens hot enough that you lose fingerprints in your haste to tear off a slice of the pizza San Daniele with San Marzano tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and San Daniele Prosciutto. Bliss.

This fan favourite is no longer the domain of the Two Chaps team, who have passed it on to new hands – but the quality has stayed high and pizzas are still meatless. Go for the ox heart tomato number with confit garlic puree, fresh buffalo mozzarella, pistachio pesto, pickled onion and fresh oregano. Yum.

At Surry Hills' Dolphin Hotel you'll find the Delfino Pizzeria, a dedicated in-house pizza kitchen. It boasts a handmade Neapolitan Mesiano wood oven, a dough recipe made of three types of Italy-imported flours, and the masterful hands of head pizzaiola Sasha Smiljanic, who previously led the kitchen at popular Newtown pizzeria Bella Brutta. In a raised corner of the main dining room, like an all-night on-stage performance, pizza bases are scattered with toppings, flashed in the oven and swept to your table in about ten minutes. The crust is wide, puffy and charred with cracked black bubbles, the type you feel could be torn off, stacked up, and served as a sumptuous stand-alone dish. When the dough’s this good, a simple marinara or Margherita suffices. The Margherita is daubed with the sweetest tomatoes, topped with mozzarella, fresh basil and olive oil, and salted with subtle shavings of parmesan. The marinara packs a firmer punch, sharp with garlic, chilli and anchovies.

Al Taglio owner and head chef Silvio Groppelli takes inspiration from Italy’s regions and age-old recipes to create his tasty focaccia and pizza at this Surry Hills restaurant. And he is doing something right, as Al Taglio was crowned the fifth best pizza is Asia Pacific for 2024. This is a big jump for the Albion Street pizzeria, which came in an 11th spot last year.

Here the pizze are smaller, and oval, not round. They’re made from a very soft dough – up to 80 per cent water – that is proved for 72 hours to keep it light and fluffy, and then crowned in 11 flavour combos, including a Margherita. But we’d go back for the de’ fiori, a white base capped with melted and fresh mozzarella, parmesan, zucchini flowers and whole anchovies that come crashing through all that light, springtime freshness like a flavour wrecking ball.

This tiny little shop is a loud and local slice of White Bay, offering traditional pizza from (gasp!) an electric oven. They’ve got some pretty strict rules here. Try ordering a ham-and-pineapple or a half-and-half and you’ll be laughed out of Balmain. But there’s no need for a tropicana when you’ve got a Margherita. As much as we always enjoy that classic of tomato, Italian buffalo mozzarella and basil, it’s Rosso Pomodoro’s patate e salsiccia – potato, Italian sausage and rosemary – that gets our vote. The pizza base is charred and bubbly, yet soft and yielding. The sausage is broken into little chunks, flavouring the thin, starchy slices of potato, all perfumed by the rosemary.

Where La Panchina really shines is the dough. The crisp base is the sort that causes crust fanatics to fall over themselves. It’s been proofed for up to two days, so you don’t leave the place with a bloated pizza belly. The classic Margherita (fresh tomato, mozz and a baby basil leaf per slice) is well-priced and delicious, and a few extra coins will get you a zhuzhed-up version topped with bufala mozzarella instead.

What makes this restaurant so likeable is the fact it's casual, yet the food is excellent. So while you may be eating a slice of pizza on the footpath followed by a couple of scoops of gelato, everything you're consuming is top notch. It's all about a relaxed evening here - order plenty of different pizze, share them around and be liberal with the vino or bierra. Salut!

Hot pizza, natural wine, disco tunes, and cold beers right by the beach – a rocking pizza party has landed in Sydney called Ullo Pizza & Wine. The team has brought on award-winning pizza master Enrico Sgarbossa to be the dough slayer. Spice lovers should try the puffy pepperoni with ’nduja, tomato, pepperoni, and jalapenos, or go for the sausage pizza with LP’s pig head’s sausage, mozzarella, provolone, lemon basil, and honey.

Takeaway pizza by the slice in the CBD? Sign us up. Headed by Totti’s executive chef Mike Eggert, Oti’ is a spin-off of the casual Italian eatery, with a daily changing menu of Roman-style, hot slab pizza, and fast and fresh Italian sandwiches built on hand-stretched schiacciata. Meats – ranging from prosciutto and salami to smoked chicken and even beef tongue – are sliced straight onto the pizzas. Then, they’re topped with at least one of the eight cheeses on offer, including Eggert’s signature burrata, mozzarella and ricotta, along with a curated selection of sauces. Of course, Merivale also looks after its veggie pals, with seasonal vege toppings, too.

Sal's is probably the only pizzeria in Sydney that can lay claim to serving an authentic New York slice. It's not that Sal's chooses to make a New York slice, it is that Sal's is a branch of the New York pizzeria established back in the 1970s in Little Neck, Queens and they have brought it to Sydney to ensure a true, New York slice. So if you're craving one, come to Darlinghurst. All the recipes have been developed by Sal himself, using Wisconsin mozzarella, Californian tomatoes and freshly milled flour from New York. Expect flavours like the classic cheese and pepperoni next to Sal's unique Buffalo chicken or meatball topped pies.

Here comes fun. And we mean it. Never has Lane Cove seemed like a more attractive place to take a long Friday lunch. Inside, the huge wood-fired pizza ovens are getting a thorough workout as the burly-armed pizzaioli push huge wooden paddles laden with pizza
in and out. It’s here that you can eat a one-metre-long pizza. We're not saying it's the most healthy lunch going, but it sure is tasty.

Since the OG Salt Meats Cheese in Alexandria closed its doors, new versions of the Italian eatery have been leading the cheese charge around Sydney. The incarnation at Circular Quay still serves up wonderful pizza and silky pastas, but with more of a family-friendly vibe. The menu is made for sharing, and they're happy to turn vegetarian pizzas vegan.